Ladder of Years (26 page)

“Is that right.”

“And she cried about it too, but Carrie cries about everything. Then for dessert we each had a bag of chocolate marbles, but I turned mine down. I was polite about it, though. I go to his mom, I go—”

“Said.”

“Huh?”

“You
said
to his mom.”

“Right, I’m all, ‘Thanks a lot, Mrs. Newell, but I’m so full I guess I better pass.’”.

“I thought you liked chocolate marbles,” his father said.

“Are you kidding? Not after what I know now.” Noah turned to Delia. “Chocolate marbles are coated with ground-up beetle shells,” he told her.

“No!” she said.

“No,” Mr. Miller agreed. “Where’d you get
that
information?” he asked his son.

“Kenny Moss told me.”

“Well, then! If Kenny Moss said it, how can we doubt it?”

“I’m serious! He heard it from his uncle who’s in the business.”

“What business—tabloid newspapers?”

“Huh?”

“There are no beetle shells in chocolate marbles. Take my word for it. The FDA would never allow it.”

“And guess what’s in corn chips,” Noah told Delia. “Those yellow corn chips? Seagull do.”

“I never knew that!”

“That’s what makes them so crackly.”

“Noah—” his father said.

“Honest, Dad! Kenny Moss swears it!”

“Noah, Delia came to talk about keeping house for us.”

Delia shot Mr. Miller a frown. He wore an oblivious, bland expression, as if he had no idea what he’d done. “Actually,” she said, turning to Noah, “I was only … inquiring.”

“She’s going to think about it,” Mr. Miller amended.

Noah said, “That’d be great! I’ve been having to fix my own school lunches.”

“Horrors,” his father said. “Don’t let on to the child-labor authorities.”

“Well, how would you feel? You open your lunch box: ‘Gee, I wonder what I surprised myself with today.’”

Delia laughed. She said, “I should be going. It was nice to meet you, Noah.”

“Goodbye,” Noah said. Unexpectedly, he held out his hand. “I hope you decide to come.”

His hand was small but callused. When he looked up at her, his eyes showed an underlay of gold, like sunshine filtered through brown water.

Outside the front door, Delia told his father, “I thought you didn’t want him to feel people were checking him over.”

“Ah,” Mr. Miller said. “Yes. Well.”

“I thought you were trying to spare him! Then you went and told him what I was here for.”

“I realize I shouldn’t have done that,” Mr. Miller said. He spread one hand distractedly across his scalp, like a cap. “It’s just that I wanted so badly for you to say you’d come.”

“And you haven’t seen my references, even! You don’t know the first thing about me!”

“No, but I approve of your English.”

“English?”

“It kills me to hear him speak so sloppily. ‘Like’ this and ‘like’ that, and ‘I go’ instead of ‘I said.’ It drives me bats.”

“Well, of all things,” Delia said. She turned to leave.

“Miss Grinstead? Delia?”

“What.”

“Will you at least think it over?”

“Of course,” she said.

But she knew she wouldn’t.

Vanessa said Joel Miller was the most pitiful man she knew of. “Ever since his wife left, the guy has been barely coping,” she told Delia.

“Isn’t anyone in Bay Borough happily married?” Delia wondered.

“Yes, lots of folks,” Vanessa said. “Just not who you choose to hang out with.”

They were sitting in Vanessa’s kitchen the following morning, a cold, sunny Saturday. Really it was her grandmother’s kitchen; Vanessa and all three of her brothers lived with their father’s mother. Vanessa was filling out labels with an old-fashioned steel-nibbed pen.
Highly Effective Insect Repellent
, she wrote, in hair-thin brown script on ivory paper ovals. Highly Effective was an ancient family recipe. When Vanessa had finished her daily allotment of labels, her youngest brother would glue them onto the slender glass phials in which various dried sprigs and berries bobbed mysteriously underwater. Delia found it hard to believe that people could make a living this way, but evidently the Linleys did all right. The house was large and comfortable, and the grandmother could afford to travel once a year to Disney World. Vanessa said the trick was pennyroyal. “Don’t let this get around,” she’d told Delia, “but insects
despise
pennyroyal. The other herbs are mostly for show.”

On the floor, Greggie was building a tower with stacks of corks. After Vanessa finished her labels, she and Delia were going to take him to visit Santa. Then Delia might do a little Christmas shopping. Or maybe not; she couldn’t decide. She had always disliked Christmas, with its possibilities for disappointing her family’s secret hopes, and this year would be worse than ever. Should she just, maybe, skip the whole business? Oh, why wasn’t there an etiquette book for runaway wives?

Which brought her back to Mr. Miller. “How come his wife left him, does anyone know?” she asked Vanessa.

“Oh, sure; everyone knows. Here they were, together for years, sweet little boy, nice house, and one day last spring Ellie, that’s his wife, found a lump in her breast. Went to the doctor and he said, yup, looked like
cancer. So she came home and told her husband. ‘In the time that I have left to me, I want to make the very best of my life. I want to do exactly what I’ve dreamed of.’ And by nightfall she had packed up and gone. That was her deepest, dearest wish—did you ever hear such a thing?”

“So where is she now?”

“Oh, she’s a TV weather lady over in Kellerton,” Vanessa said. “The lump was nothing at all; they removed it under local anesthetic. Now Mr. Miller and Noah can turn on their TV and watch her every evening. Or you might have seen her in
Boardwalk Bulletin.
They ran a profile of her last August. Real pretty blond? Hair like that shredded straw we pack our bottles in. Course, no one here was impressed in the slightest—person who’d leave her own child.”

Delia looked down at her lap.

“All the women in town have been trying to help Mr. Miller out,” Vanessa said. “Bringing pans of lasagna, taking his kid for the afternoon. But I guess by summer he realized it wasn’t enough, because that’s when he put the ad in the
Bugle.”

“The ad’s been in since summer?”

“Right, but his neighbor tells me the onliest answers were teenaged girls from the high school. Every girl at Dorothy Underwood’s got a crush on Mr. Miller. I did too; it’s part of being a student there. I was a senior the first year he was principal, and I thought he was the sexiest man I’d ever laid eyes on. But of course he can’t hire some airhead, so he’s just kept running the ad. It never crossed my mind you’d want the job yourself.”

“Well, I don’t, really,” Delia said. She watched Greggie start a cork train across the linoleum. His little hands reminded her of biscuits, that kind with a row of fork holes pricked on top. She had forgotten what a joy it was to rest your eyes on young children. “It’s just that I’m so fed up with Mr. Pomfret,” she said. “Do you suppose they have any openings at the furniture factory?”

“Oh, the furniture factory,” Vanessa said, dipping her pen. “All’s they ever need there is oilers. Stand all day rubbing oil into chair legs with these big mittens on your hands.”

“But they must have office positions. Typist, filing clerk …”

“How come you’re not taking the job at Mr. Miller’s?”

“I don’t want to just … step into a little boy’s life like that, in case I decide to leave,” Delia told her.

“Do you always up and leave a place?”

Delia wasn’t sure how that question was intended. She looked at Vanessa suspiciously. “No, not always,” she said.

“I mean I never heard you speak a word against Zeke Pomfret. Now you want to quit.”

“He’s so bossy, though. So condescending. Also, the pay is ridiculous,” Delia said. “I didn’t realize how ridiculous when I took the job. And he doesn’t even provide health insurance! What if I got sick?”

Vanessa sat back to watch her.

“Well,” Delia told her, “yes, I
do
seem to up and leave a lot.”

As she spoke, she saw a lone, straight figure marching down the coastline. It was strange, the feeling of affection the image summoned up in her.

For her family’s Christmas, she decided to buy nothing at all. Maybe Greggie’s trip to Santa had depressed her. He had appeared to grasp the concept before they went, but once they got there he started screaming and had to be carried out. Vanessa was crushed; even the Santa looked crushed. And their shopping expedition afterward was spiritless, with Greggie hiccuping tearfully and slouching in his stroller in a brooding, insulted manner. Delia told Vanessa she thought she would call it a day. “I need to go to the laundromat anyhow,” she said—a flimsy excuse.

When she got home, Belle hailed her from the living-room doorway. “You had a phone call,” she said.

“I did?”

Her knees seemed to melt. She thought first of the children, then of Sam’s heart.

But Belle said, “Mr. Miller from the high school. He wants you to call him back.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t know you knew Joel Miller.”

Delia hadn’t mentioned him to Belle because working for him would mean moving out of this house, and how could she ever do that? This house was perfect. Even Mr. Pomfret had his good points. Somehow the visit to Santa had shown her that. So she nonchalantly accepted the number Belle had scrawled on the corner of a takeout menu. Might as well get this over with. She perched on one arm of the couch and reached for the phone and dialed. Meanwhile Belle hovered in the background,
supposedly absorbed with the cat. “Is you a nice little kitty. Is you a sweet little kitty,” she crooned. Delia listened to the ringing at the other end of the line, letting her eyes travel gratefully over the blank white walls and bare floorboards.

“Hello?” Noah said.

She said, “This is Delia Grinstead.”

“Oh, hi! I’m supposed to tell you I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? For what?”

“Dad says a guy shouldn’t talk about seagull do in front of ladies.”

“Oh. Well—”

A man said something in the background.

“Women,” Noah said.

“Excuse me?”

“‘Women,’ I meant to say, not ‘ladies.’”

All pretext, of course. Mr. Miller surely didn’t think she would be offended by seagull do. Or the word “ladies.” This was mere strategy. But Noah himself probably had no inkling of that, and so Delia told him, “It’s quite all right.”

“Kenny Moss’s uncle drives a snack truck; that’s how Kenny knows about the you-know-what. But Dad claims his uncle was teasing him. Dad goes, ‘Right, the corn-chip factory really does take the time to send their workers out to the beach with shovels.’”

Another mutter in the background.

“Okay, ‘said.’ He
said
,” Noah told Delia. “And on top of that he
said
”—heavy stress, meaningful pause—“he said how come it’s not in the list of ingredients, if they use seagull do? Oops.”

“Oh, you know those lists,” Delia told him. “All those scientific terms. They can cover up just about anything with some chemical-sounding name.”

“They can?”

“Why, sure! They probably call it ‘dihydroxyexymexylene’ or some such.”

Noah giggled. “Hey, Dad,” he said, his voice retreating slightly. “Delia says it probably is on the list; it’s probably dihydroxy …”

Belle had carried the cat over to the window now. She was holding him up to the glass, which was nearly opaque with dust. And cobwebs clouded the tops of the curtains, and the philodendron plant on the sill was leggy and bedraggled. The whole room seemed drained of color, as if, already, it had slipped into the dimmest reaches of Delia’s memory.

12

Mr. Pomfret said, “Moving on, eh,” without so much as a change of expression. (You would think she was a piece of office equipment.) All he asked, he said, was that she finish out the week—tie up any dangling odds and ends. Which of course she agreed to do, even though there were no odds and ends; just the usual busywork of rat-a-tat letters and robot phone calls and Mr. Pomfret’s daily sheaf of marked catalogs.

It seemed he urgently required a pair of perforated leather driving gloves. A radio antenna the size and shape of a breakfast plate. A solid-walnut display rack for souvenir golf balls.

When she turned in her office key on Friday afternoon, he told her he might wait till after New Year’s to replace her. “This time,” he said, “I believe I’ll hire a word processor, assuming I can find one.”

Delia was confused, for an instant. She pictured hiring a machine. Just try asking a machine to debate his glove size with an 800 operator! she thought. Then she realized her mistake. But still, somehow, she felt hurt, and she shouldered her bag abruptly and left without saying goodbye.

———

All she owned fit easily in a cardboard carton begged from Rick-Rack’s. The goosenecked lamp poked its head out, though. She could have left it that way (Belle was giving her a ride), but she liked the notion of a life no larger than a single, compact box; and so she shifted things until the flaps closed securely. Then she took her coat and handbag from the bed, and she picked the carton up and walked out.

No point sending one last look backward. She knew every detail of that room by heart—every nail hole, every seam in the wallpaper, and the way the paw-footed radiator, in the furry half-light of this overcast Saturday morning, resembled some skeletal animal sitting on its haunches.

At the bottom of the stairs, she set down her load and put her coat on. She could hear Belle talking to George in the kitchen. He was staying here another week or two, just till Delia was settled. It was Delia’s belief that she had to let her own smell permeate the new place first; otherwise he’d keep running back to the old place.

Mr. Miller had told her George was more than welcome. He’d been meaning to buy a cat anyhow, he said. (But notice how he’d used the word “buy,” apparently unaware that true animal lovers would not be caught dead in a pet shop.)

Still buttoning her coat, she walked through the dining room to knock on the kitchen door. “Coming,” Belle called. Delia returned to the hall. Upstairs, Mr. Lamb was creaking the floorboards, and his TV had started its level, fluent murmur. She wondered when he would get around to noticing she was gone. Maybe never, she thought.